Thursday, March 14, 2013

- They'll "Overlook" Your Violation...

Mike Bloomberg owns a company, the principle product of which is a software tool supplied to me and my brethren in the financial services business. It's a suite of data gathering, charting and news tools colloquially referred to as the Bloomberg "Terminal".

This is a fairly high quality product as such things go and as a result it's the dominant tool in the industry in spite of it's 25K per year (per terminal) price. It is to modern finance as Microsoft Windows is to personal computing. It doesn't solve every problem, but it solves so many that it's hard to find a finance firm without one.

What I have always been annoyed with however, is how they manage their relationship with their customers.

Their licensing of this product is ridiculously restrictive. So restrictive that many things which are a common practice in the industry are absolutely forbidden by it. In fact if you were to adhere to the strict licensing of the tool, it would in effect become almost totally useless.

But most of Bloomberg's customers don't know this. Nobody who uses the tool actually reads those licensing agreements, and the people that read them don't use the tool. And the way the Bloomberg sales and auditing teams handle it when the find that you are not in compliance with your licensing, is that they are willing to "overlook" any indiscretions so long as you buy enough product from them.

In other words it's all a big scam to put them in control of your decision making with regard to data and trading tools. 99% of their clients violate the contract, and are forgiven by Bloomberg so long as they pay up. To my knowledge Bloomberg is the only company that manages their client relationships in a manner like that.